The current bumper crop of personal-infrastructure startups offering concierge-adjacent services is fertilized by a simple insight: Many professionals have traded too much of their time for money and now want to trade some money for time. There are plenty of AI-fluent opportunists ready to make that deal. What makes Lizzy Livne, the founder of Quiet Lux, stands out in that group is that the former IDF combat soldier and venture capitalist treats the requests her clients text her like mini-missions. She’s run more than 2,500. Livne deploys the odd lifestyle koan in service of marketing, but she’s a grinder. For $7,500 a year (after a $500 trial month), Livne and her team mobilize on behalf of people who are taking care of business but not, in any meaningful way, taking care of themselves.
Upper Middle spoke with Livne about what $7,500 worth of “personal hospitality” actually buys – and why large concierge often don’t understand what clients want.
When it comes to start ups, the most interesting question is always the same: Why are you, a person who could be other stuff3, doing this?
On a professional level, I’m extremely together. On a personal level, less so. My friends call me “micro-irresponsible.” I think those two things are related. Your ability to worry is a resource and it gets depleted. I deplete that resource at work and don’t have any concern left for my personal life. That translates into, like, ‘Oops, I haven't seen a doctor in five years.’ This is a product for people who have a similar problem.
Who are those people and, let’s be direct about it, how rich are they?
I target dual-income households around New York City in which both partners have careers they care a lot about. When there’s no predetermined captain of the family on the domestic front, the chaos gets unmanageable. It’s less about identifying super wealthy people than thinking about how value works within a household.
I should add that I predominantly sell to women, who are tough. Women tend to be better educated consumers and many also feel pressure to take charge at home.
What’s the pitch that resonates with that kind of person, who is presumably a member of the upper upper middle given that they don’t have staff?
I sell quiet. As tech has evolved, it's made life more chaotic and the feeling of just being taken care of – knowing somebody else has got this – is what people want. It’s like walking into a restaurant that's been around for ten years and knows your order. I want to create that kind of feeling across all aspects of my clients’ lives. The attitude toward my team should be: “I know they'll figure it out.” That allows for quiet.
Figuring it out seems hard because it’s super context dependent. How do you factor in taste when you’re fielding a request from a client?
We focus a lot of energy on understand what people mean when they text us. For example: When a mother in Connecticut texts us about a camp trunk, she’s talking about a specific product that is not, curiously enough, really sold in New York. We have to know that. Everyone now lives in these micro-cultures so we have to contextualize individuals. That’s a challenge because it’s not enough to just grab reservations at trendy restaurants. Most of our clients don’t care about what’s trendy. They want to go places that make them feel good.
Also, they don’t want to get ripped off. That’s universal. There’s a sense now – and I think this is right – that we’re all paying for premium and not getting premium.
Around this time of year, a lot of “gift concierges” pop up to help people too busy in Q4 to shop. How do you think about creating value for people that use your service that way?
Most people don’t need another candle – $300 or otherwise. The problem is most gifts don’t have time to do personal so they do performatively expensive. When we help people gift intentionally, their costs actually go down.
You don’t have an app. Why not?
No one wants one.
